This is my personal blog for tracking my hobby programming development. Any opinions expressed here do not represent my employer in any way.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

A New Year and New Goals

Last year, I sat down and decided that I was going to release one RPG per month. They didn't have to be complete games and they didn't have to be very good, but they had to be kind of done and I had to release them. Looking back, it uh... well, it went incredibly poorly. I released two games, one of which wasn't even an RPG, and made a lot of progress on another, but mostly I was just feeling frustrated with myself. Eventually I got interested in the MSU-1 and did some stuff with that instead (which I'm still working on, by the way. I just haven't had much progress to report lately).

This year, I'm not doing that stuff. I want to settle on one game design and work steadily towards it over the course of the entire year. I'm not saying I should be done with the game by the end of 2014, but I want to be able to look back and be proud of how much I've done.

I feel like it's a personal flaw that I can't release one game per month for the entire year, but... I just can't. I want to make games for a living, but I just need to focus on what I can do for now. I can focus on trying to live up to my personal expectations later when I have more experience.

My goal for January and February is to create a design document for my game for the year, and also to select an engine. This may take a while because I want to explore game engines that I don't have a lot of experience with, such as Unity. So there might be a lot of learning involved in these two months. Either way, at the end of each month I'm gonna post my progress here and possibly solicit feedback.

I think the slow build is a good idea. You tried the quick slap it together development and that didn't fit with the fact that you're much more detail oriented. I think that a slow but steady approach that lets you focus on each step will work well for you.

Remember, we're always around to brain-storm or knock ideas against. I'm not a game developer, I'm a writer, but that doesn't mean I don't understand development or programming, just that I don't do it on a regular basis. So, feel free to try bouncing design ideas off of me as well as story-plotting.